© 2003 Brian Hodges - Please do not remove the copyright from this essay

very year, the second grade in my school did a month-long project involving pen pals. They'd get a list of kids' names from a neighboring school and write letters back and forth, learning about letter structure, the postal service and the taste of stamps along the way. The project culminated on a day when the pen pals finally met. As a final act of pen pal unity, everybody wrote one more letter, tied the letters to balloons and then released them. The balloons floated into the afternoon sky with the excitement of new pen pals just over the horizon.

I waited two long years to do the balloon thing. I was psyched to do the balloon thing. But when the time came, my second grade teacher Miss Overlock told us we were not doing the balloon thing this year. Something about fish choking to death. This was right around the time those tree-huggers at the EPA were trying to make us feel guilty about all things rubber and plastic. They told us fish were mistaking grocery bags, six-pack fasteners and pen pal balloons for bait and trying to swallow them whole. They (the EPA, not the fish) apparently had never stopped to consider the theory of Natural Selection which states that, "Any animal who selects its food before verifying that it is in fact natural, does not deserve to live in the first place."

I blame them (the EPA and the fish) for my pen pal never writing back.

I was a very committed child. When I decided I wanted to do something, I didn't let anything stand in my way. If the second grade wasn't going to help me send a balloon to a new pen pal, I was prepared to go it alone. Unfortunately, I had no idea how the whole process was supposed to work.

The letter part was easy.

Dear Pen Pal,
How are you? I am fine. Do you like to go sledding? I do. I have a cat and a dog. Do you have dogs? They are fun. But aren't fish stupid? Write back soon.
Love,
Brian

Perfect letter structure. Thanks Miss Overlock. But with nobody around to teach me the mechanics of this particular mailing method, I had to learn by trial and error. The first important rule I learned is that you must tie the letter to the balloon and release it on the day the balloon is inflated. I got sidetracked after tying my letter to a leftover birthday balloon. It's tough getting anything done when your bedtime is seven o'clock. So the balloon just floated in my room for a few days. I woke up one morning to discover it was no longer floating, but simply… hovering. When I finally released the balloon, it immediately sank to the ground under the weight of the letter.

But I learned my lesson, and when the next opportunity (and balloon) presented itself, I tied that letter on and let it fly right away. Up and up it went, off to find me a new pen pal. I watched until it cleared the horizon, excited but perplexed. How on earth was my pen pal ever going to write back to me? The odds of their balloon finding me by sheer chance seemed astronomical. But I figured, others have done it, it must just work out somehow. Had the fish and the EPA not discouraged Miss Overlock from doing the balloon thing, maybe somebody could have explained to me that I actually had to put my return address on the letter! How the heck could I have known that? How could I have known that after the initial balloon was sent, everything from that point on was supposed to take place by standard mail?

I waited and waited for my balloon to come back. But it never did. Realization didn't dawn on me until several years later and by then it was too late. So if anybody reading this column found a letter attached to a balloon in rural Maine around 1986 that mentioned something about sledding and dogs, please contact me through this website.

And to all the fish and employees of the EPA, I hope you choke on a plastic bag.